grantees » Weiya Huo

Weiya-Huo is a passionate and driven environmental entrepreneur. After working as a journalist for Chinadialogue.net (a bilingual platform ‘where China and the world discuss the environment’) for three years, he branched off and founded his own magazine – the Youth Environmental Review (2010).  The magazine focuses on the many environmental problemsChina is facing today due to its rapid development.

Setting up a new magazine was full of challenges and difficulties and Weiya-Huo soon found that if he wanted the magazine to succeed, he needed to evolve his editing skills, grow his network and learn more about environmental sociology. “I found my vision was not wide enough, I didn’t have enough knowledge accumulated, and I lacked some essential skills” he reflects.

This is where the Joke Waller-Hunter Initiative was able to help. Weiya-Huo used his JWHi grant to purchase relevant books, attend seminars/meetings and arrange an interview with Guo Ruzhong, an environmental activist who suffers from cancer due to overexposure to pollutants. Through these experiences he found a new calling, namely the linking of the environmental movement to cross sector communication (NGO, academia and activism). The grant gave him the exposure and through that he discovered… “I want to enhance the communication between environmental NGOs and scholars on Youth Environmental Review, this kind of communication will help the activists understand what they have done…and in addition, there will be more activist information which is not from NGOs.”

Individual environmental activism was totally new to Weiya-Huo and it was this, unbeknownst to him that he was searching for. Stories that would inspire individuals to change, lead people to empower themselves to tackle some of the environmental problems facing China. He says “I used to think the subject of the environmental movement in China was only environmental NGOs and their effect is tremendous, but now I have changed this opinion… activists, who are not in NGOs, sometimes can do more.”

Over the last year, Weiya-Huo feels ‘the magazine has matured’ and he hopes through the knowledge and network he has gained thanks to the JWH Initiative grant it continues in that vain.